Arnab Ray's Blog, page 2

Why I haven’t watched Pathaan yet

There is a place in the song “Ai Re Ai Re” from Rangeela where Aditya Narayan sings ‘Horlicks peene main tension hai, doodh peene main tension hai, tension tension tension.’ Cutely rapped by the son of the legendary Udit Narayan, and the only time Aditya Narayan would get as cute would be when many years later at an airport when he would say to a recalcitrant aviation executive: “Teri chaddi naheen utaari toh” (a line I am told progressive websites in the Indian space inspire themselves with when they make-up investigative reports like they did on collaboration between Meta and the BJP gormint because they too will go to any lengths to take off the saffron “chaddi”), these words keep ringing in my ear as I contemplate whether to watch Pathaan in theaters.

On the one hand, I am supposed to boycott Pathaan. I am supposed to do so, because we all need to stand up to nepotism, even though Shahrukh Khan happens to be perhaps the very few examples we have in India of an individual who has become a global brand, with absolutely no family push from behind. But no I am mistaken, it is not nepotism this time, it is because Shahrukh Khan represents Urduwood, where even the song “Chaiya Chaiya” is a dog whistle for Love Jihad, and no this is not a joke this is an actual piece of analysis, what happens when the extreme right tries to co-opt the left’s “progressive analysis rubric” where nothing is as it is, a song isn’t a song and a movie isn’t a movie, but a weapon of identity, where one group uses every cultural artifact it controls in order to humiliate and dominate the other.

No, you stupid, people will tell me, it’s not the person, it’s the theme. Pathaan depicts a sympathetic ISI agent collaborating with RAW, as terrible as “Aman Ki Asha” as you ever saw, and that’s why this should be boycotted. Because of course, out of all the believable things shown in Pathaan, of laws of gravity being broken as easily as traffic laws in Gurgaon, the one smidgen of what-we-believe-the-audience-would-take-seriously-and-extrapolate-to-“Pakistan is a friendly country” is that part of the narrative copied-pasted from Ek Tha Tiger. But no, the problem is really the fact that they show a rogue RAW agent, again a plot point lifted from multiple James Bond movies, the oldest genre trope that there is, an indicator of Pathaan’s sinister design to “blame India”. Even though, the movie clearly identifies Pakistan as the villain (unlike Main Hoon Na, which actually pushes the “both India and Pakistan are equal victims of terror” liberal clap-trap) and is infused with a lot of flag-waving patriotism, which any commercial movie that wishes to succeed puts dollops of, because JNU, college campuses in metropolitan cities, the staff of “The Wire”, and “progressive Twitter” by themselves cannot make a movie recoup its investment.

But Pathaan is a declaration of community pride if you just look at its name. I am kind of outraged no one has been outraged by this, and called for a boycott. They would have had, if a movie by the name of Rajput or Kshatriya was made. No on of course did in the 80s and 90s when movies of this name were actually released, but in today’s world, that would not have been the case, because such names would absolutely be in the firing line for internet progressives. Somehow this outrage has passed us by, and I think I may know the reason.

On another hand, I am supposed to watch Pathaan. Pathaan, as per the great Vir Sanghvi, is a battle for the soul of India, and the last time something like this happened was when Dara Sikhoh fought Aurangzeb, or was it when Modi took on Kejriwal, I forget when. Watching Pathaan in theaters is the way to show the “Hindu fascists” that they may take our lives, but they will never take our freedom. Buying a ticket, and a few, is a symbol of resistance, a smack in the face of the boycott gang aligned with the Hindu right, a flickering flame of democracy in a land where democracy no longer exists, because the people we don’t like have won elections at the center a few times. And every rupee that goes into Shahrukh Khan’s purse will be one that does not go into Adani’s and Ambani’s, and for a man who spent money on buying Pat Cummins and Mashrafe Mortaza and Aaron Finch for his franchise, that’s not too much to give.

On the third hand, I am supposed to watch Pathan but also boycott Pathaan. I am not making this up, but I have read, on Twitter, the source of all truths, that Shahrukh Khan should not be a cause celebre for progressives, because he did not speak for CAA and JNU, in the way Deepika Padukone did (she also endorsed Rahul Gandhi when Congress ruled, so definitely courageous). Hence exulting at the success of Pathaan is fine for giving the Modi government a black eye, but let us also not lionize Shahrukh Khan. Yes, despite speaking for Pakistan as a good neighbor (something that I personally wish Shahrukh Khan had not done) and speaking against the othering of Muslims, long before it became a Modi-only thing, Shahrukh Khan is sufficiently lacking in progressive temper, and so while you should definitely watch this movie, because that would get the chaddis in a twist, you also should not watch it, because it also glorifies India.

So now to be a bit serious. As someone who was one of the few commentators then to speak out against “Slumdog Millionaire” and as someone who found “PK” to be carefully-constructed Hinduphobia passed off as “against all religion”, long before it became viral to do so, I find this posturing around Pathaan on both sides to be hilarious. Before Lal Singh Chadda released, I had said it will be a flop because it is a terrible idea (transplanting a narrative based on American history to India) that would not warrant a trip to the theater during a covid scare, and not because a boycott would succeed. When it bombed, I was told no it bombed because of the “aroused” Hindu right wing voice which has found critical influence using Whatsapp, and not because it was a movie no one felt any passion for, and hey what can you do when provided with such data-driven argument?

Of course, they are not going to accept the success of Pathaan either. The true believers will say that the apparent commercial success of Pathaan is all paid PR and that all screens are empty and the people watching the movie are paid actors and look this theater is empty on this show.This mimics the world view of many who believe Modi wins only because of a sinister trifecta of election bonds, hacked election boxes, and Godi media. In this world of polarized echo chambers, the truth matters less in front of belief.

But, going by what seems to be stellar box office numbers, this just goes to show that people just care for entertainment, entertainment and entertainment, and as long as you can produce a theater-only spectacle that cannot be fully experienced in OTT, and you have a mega-star doing nothing “arty” (no Zero or Fan please), the money will flow, no matter what neo Marxist rhetoric left over from Buzzfeed may condemn you for, and the irony now is that the rhetoric is now used by both sides of the political divide.

As to me, I will not be watching Pathaan in theaters, instead waiting for it to drop on OTT, when I will watch it with a drink, in the same way I watched the previous entry in the “YRF spy universe”—War. I am going to do this not because of my politics or my need to make a statement, but simply because I am pretty sure that the entertainment I will get if I pay full ticket price will not be adequate return on my investment in terms of price and time. (At home, I can simply turn off the TV if its get too painful). Years ago, I would have gone to the theaters to see a Shahrukh flick, and as someone who went to see Qaid Main Hai Bulbul starring Bhagyasree’s husband Himalaya I cannot claim to be discerning connoisseur of high-class cinematic entertainment, but now older, I think I have lost some of my enthusiasm for stuff I know will be formula. And I am not even sure how much of Shahrukh Khan I will even get to see here, given the VFX tendency to buff up the muscles and add a few more packs, in a Ship of Theseus way, and even if it is him fully in flesh, this is a Salman Khan franchise, catering to his fan-base, and I am definitely not in that set. To be honest, something about a “YRF spy universe” from the guys who brought you the Mohabbatein film universe where even ChatGPT cannot tell you how many love stories there were in Mohabbatein, is inherently off-putting, and I think I will indeed enjoy it more if I saw it half-drunk.

But please do feel free to carry on on social media, please do feel free to think of it as the world. Please feel free to, cause I will be doing it myself.

BUT AT LEAST THERE IS AN APOLOGY

It has been a bloodbath in technology recently, with massive unprecedented layoffs in the crème de la crème of tech, often abbreviated as MAANG (Meta-Amazon-Apple-Netflix-Google) as well as some of the hottest startups in Silicon Valley (how do you know someone works in a “crème de la crème” company? They write ex- after they no longer work for it). While most of the engineers with strong technological foundations, laid off from these companies will firmly land on their feet, being highly qualified individuals in most cases with stellar resumes, those on an H1B immigrant visa are on a very short fuse in terms of the number of days they can stay in the USA and look for a job. This means they might have to leave the country, incur financial losses and stress to themselves and family, or settle for a job that is not what they would have liked to do.

Life, I have always said, rewards you not for your abilities or hard work but for the risk you take. But here the problem was that many of the engineers were not even aware of the danger they were in, after all, what could be more desirable or “safe” than a job offer from Amazon or Google, it’s like working for the Indian Railways but many times the salary, look at the stock prices, look at the prestige, look at the hype, let’s go and buy a house based on the insane value of the stock I will receive.

But why were they in danger? According to the CEOs, they “grew” too fast, and Jack, the virtue signaller supreme of Twitter and the richest man with a dude-goatee, cried himself a river apologizing for growing Twitter too fast.

I own the responsibility for why everyone is in this situation: I grew the company size too quickly. I apologize for that.

The CEO of hot-startup Stripe and wannabe Jack, after slashing 14% of their workforce, wrote a long mea-culpa to his departing employees, in another display of virtue signaling for social media, and these were his words:

In making these changes, you might reasonably wonder whether Stripe’s leadership made some errors of judgment. We’d go further than that. In our view, we made two very consequential mistakes, and we want to highlight them here since they’re important:

We were much too optimistic about the internet economy’s near-term growth in 2022 and 2023 and underestimated both the likelihood and impact of a broader slowdown.We grew operating costs too quickly. Buoyed by the success we’re seeing in some of our new product areas, we allowed coordination costs to grow and operational inefficiencies to seep in.

Here is our man Zuck, the world’s most socially awkward man, creating the world’s biggest social media company, putting his own “mumble-mumble” spin on things.

At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth. Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected. Not only has online commerce returned to prior trends, but the macroeconomic downturn, increased competition, and ads signal loss have caused our revenue to be much lower than I’d expected. I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that.

So you have two options. Either you believe that some of the world’s smartest people, backed up by other very smart people backed by some of the best financial science money can buy, all made the exact same mistake at the exact same time, of growing too fast during Covid, in the way middle aged men find their waistlines, OR you suspect that maybe, just maybe, there is something else going on.

In order to understand the real game, let’s take a step back. In the days of old, a business’s success was measured in the amount of money it made as profits. This is so obvious as to not need stating, but in this current milieu, it needs to be written down in black and white. The duty of a company was to its shareholders i.e. its owners with its objective being to maximize returns for its investors. If it kept on making losses, investors left, if it made a profit, investors piled on. Of course, money would need to be raised from the market, through debt, since one cannot operate purely out of earned capital and one also needed money for expansions, but the money raised (or the ease of raising money) was based on current profits, which again was a function of the actual demand of the product in the market. I say “days of old”, but most companies in the world still work on this model, at least to an extent —they survive because there is concrete and current demand for their products—be it medicines or televisions or groceries or clothes, and yes they raise money for new initiatives, but it is usually based firmly on what they currently do, what products sell, and most importantly, what products make money.

In comes the new days, a marriage of Wall Street and Silicion Valley. This model starts from the assumption that demand for a product does not exist, it needs to be created by the company itself, what instead exists is a “potential for demand” and the “potential for a business to service the demand”. Note, please, the addition of the phrase “potential for”. The primary goal for the CEOs of the world, be it of Zuckerberg or uncle who brags off being the CEO of his single-person startup, is to demonstrate the “potential for a business to service the demand”. So the way it works in this model is

You have an ideaYou develop a prototype, financed by your own moneyYour prototype acquire users. Once you acquire a certain number of users, people invest in you. You now have a product.The more users you have, the more you understand what users really want, and you develop the product furtherIf not profitable yet, keep doing steps 4 and 5.

The metric to gauge a company’s “potential for a business to service the demand” is measured by the people currently using it, in much the same way we measure a person’s worth by the number of followers they have on social media and the likes they get. Specifically, Wall Street and investors measure a company’s growth, how fast their users increase, they predict how much it will increase next quarter, if it meets or surpasses the expectation set forth by Wall Street and investors, the company is “doing great”i.e. meeting its objective and more money flows in to the company.

If you note, dear reader, I did not use the word “profit” for quite a few paragraphs. In the new paradigm of business, profit is not as important as the acquisition of users or to put it even more generally.”product buzz” (are people talking about your product). That is why so many unicorn startups bleed money to acquire users, and that is why so much of modern startup culture is about publicity and big talk about huge problems. Without “excitement” and “hype”, there is no perception of growth potential, and consequently, there is no “money raised”.

Take the example of Twitter. From 2010 to 2021, Twitter has lost money *every year* except 2019 and 2018, and the amount of money it made is dwarfed by the amount of money it has lost and using the naive lens of profits, you would wonder why Twitter even survives, far more why it is always in the news. But there itself you have the answer, it is always in the news, it is always being hyped, it always is being condemned by both left and the right, and it has the persistent buzz that many other more solid companies can dream of, and the reason for that, despite many attempts, it has a high number of users and premium users, those with money and influence, even though (and Musk is trying his level best to figure this out) no one has cracked the equation of making money from this in a sustainable and profitable way, and yet, Twitter is what it is, over ten years.

Take another example of a hot startup, Carvana, which was seeking to create a new, what’s the MBA-speak here, oh yes paradigm, for selling cars. Here is what Forbes writes about Carvana’s spectacular crash.

In light of the earnings miss, many investors are pointing to the balance sheet as they worry about the company’s long-term growth. Carvana doesn’t have much cash on hand, and they have $6.3 billion in debt, including $5.7 billion in senior notes. The company has consistently borrowed money to cover losses. They’ve also borrowed money in the past for growth plans as they finance. The most shocking aspect of the earnings report is the amount of cash the company has burned through. Carvana’s cash and equivalents totaled $1.05 billion in its second quarter this year, it now has just $316 million left.

Now the difference between Twitter and Carvana is that the latter was not able to, despite its high advertising budget in media, meet its growth expectations (i.e. its potential to serve its market), while Twitter has been able to (glory be to Jack), even though none of them have made profits.

As an exercise for the reader, now try to think of why Mark Zuckerberg has re-branded Facebook as Meta and invested billions of dollars in a speculative pipe dream called the Metaverse? Hints: growth potential, excitement, buzz.

So how is the real money made here? I mean if no one was making money, how is this game being played repeatedly? If you look at the list above, steps 4 and 5 are repeated, the investors in the (n-1)th round get their return on investment from the money raised in the nth round, and the CEO and the executive management put some of that in their pocket, and so yes, money is made, insane amounts of it, just not in profit, and that someone at the end is left holding the can. Now it is not that all companies falter before they reach step 6, some do actually make profits, but most crash and burn a lot earlier, but not before making a few people very, very rich.

Coming back to the “growth mistake”. Covid19 came along, locking down the world, and while overall it destroyed many of the old businesses which worked on actual demand for their products, it was a God-given boon for many of the companies that were in the business of demonstrating potential for profit. As people stayed home, e-commerce rose, non-cash transactions rose, streaming rose, buying cars from home rose, riding a tidal wave, and every CEO with projections for growth found those projections met, exceeded and some.

However, rather than honestly recognizing that this was an accident and the growth could not be expected to sustain itself, they all rolled the dice and upped their growth expectation. And since they had already met a very high bar and exceeded it, they were patted on their back, took home record compensation, and then the nth round of investment was huge. There was another reason for the hugeness of the nth round: interest rates were dirt-low. No one plays this game with their own money, they borrow from the market, and so combine these two factors, easy money and unprecedented growth, Covid19 led to huge capital influx, most of it being siphoned off to the (n-1) investors and of course executive management, their take being in proportion to their position from the apex.

When one is committed to grow, one needs to hire (remember once again, it does not matter how much you spend to meet these objectives). This bidding war for talent then triggered the great HR-churn of 2021, the “Great Leaving”, as conventional companies found themselves unable to hold onto their employees as the “potential for growth” businesses poached them away with insane salaries, salaries which were being funded by their outsized capital influx from the market and salaries which would not sustain. Obviously when you hire, just to show your investors that you have the capacity to meet their next growth target, you not only pay way more, but also end up with talent that is not aligned with what you can maintain, “potential of growth” translates to “potential to perform”, and as we know so much does not live up to their potential. Of course, they knew, this kind of hiring and these kinds of compensation would not last, but remember the scheme, dear readers, the ones making the decisions will not be left with the nuclear waste, that will be the investors who bought into the last round of hype and obviously the employees, who will be let go off during the holiday season, and an apology email that says “I am sorry we grew too fast”.

But what about Google and what about Amazon? These are consistently profitable companies, with demonstrable demands for their already existing products, market-leaders in their verticals, and not the “selling dream” kind of fly-by-night operators. You are right, they occupy a spectrum between solid old-world businesses and new-world ones (it’s another tragedy that even old-world companies are moving to this model). They have multiple, nearly independent lines of business, some of them quite speculative in the”potential for growth” categories , and sometimes the more profitable parts of the business are used to bankroll the expensive bets in the growth areas, and sometimes they do not and the speculative branches are allowed to die while the main trunk remains untouched. This is why Google became Alphabet, to more clearly isolate the foundational aspects of the business from the speculative.

Let us consider Amazon. Their cloud infrastructure business, which is based on solid fundamentals of profit, has had no layoffs to my knowledge, but their layoffs have happened in those lines of business that are more speculative–like their hardware business and Alexa voice control, scheduled to lose $10 billion. One may ask, as many ask, why cannot Jeff Bezos take the loss, and the reason, besides personal greed, is simple: he has growth targets to meet and other growth stories to sell, if there is a part of the business for which no narrative can be constructed and no suckers found to invest in, it is dead weight and needs to be jettisoned.

Now Google/Alphabet. From what I hear, their plans as of now, are to fire 6% of their poorest performers across the board, which would be 10,000 employees. Besides the stigma the fired employees will now have to bear (will people be writing ex-Googler now on Linkedin I wonder), there are other things about this that require a closer look. In a letter written by an activist investor (the guys who matter), Christopher Hohn, he cites several items of data—including Google’s hiring 20% annually, and its median salary being 153% higher than the 20 largest listed tech companies in the US. And why has this happened? Simple. Google has hired too many and at too much in order to grow fast or more cynically, demonstrate the capability to grow fast, to get the next round of investment. And now, people will likely lose their jobs, people on H1Bs, new parents, and fresh graduates. Why now? Same reason as everyone—higher interest rates, less “easy money”, and in the case of Google/Alphabet, a 27% drop in profit in its Q3 2022 earnings report , and therein lies the rub, Google still makes a profit, quite a lot of it, but since revenue growth is down from 41% to 6%, it is demonstrating to the moneybags of the world, less potential for profit, and hence Pichai sir needs to meet growth expectations by lopping off the decaying branches, or else someone else will take investment money earmarked for Google by showing more potential.

Now there is nothing wrong with any of this, it is all predatory capitalism with the devil taking the hindmost, and as I said in the beginning, the world rewards you for the risk you take, not your effort, and working at these companies remains for most people the fastest way to generate wealth through income, but as an employee, nor privy to the games going around in the stratosphere where you may not enter and the way market performance truly works, it is good or rather fair to know the risk you are exposed to. So most certainly take the MAANG or startup job, especially if it is at 150% more than what it is outside, but do take a moment to contemplate the risk, plan accordingly and know that in end you may be getting an apology mail from a very very rich guy.

The Day He Came Back

Cricket lives in two realities. One is of shenanigans, politics, and capitalism on steroids. The other: the reality of our dreams, of Sachin in the desert, Dhoni at the crease, and Dada through the off-side, of great games and of moments, of heartbreak and of elation, of lumps in throat and tears in eyes, of understanding, in an era of disbelief, what it means to have faith.

While we live in the world of the former, it is the latter that keeps us there, and so now add to those memories that last a lifetime, one more, of Kohli against Pakistan, on a juiced-up pitch against seamers hurtling thunderbolts, with all falling around him, taking India to a victory against their arch-rivals Pakistan.

It’s the kind of thing you never forget, even in this day and age, even with age and overexposure to the game and the skepticism that comes from both, every scorecard melts into another, of social media noise “in the moment” and yet nothing left in the lake of memories in a few days, covered up under the noise of the next match.

You do not forget this though for a reason.

For you have seen sport at its very best.

Harris Rauf is a fast man, and he bowls a mean ball. On a sizzling pitch in Melbourne, made even more lively by overhead clouds, he has been the pick of the Pakistani bowlers. India is on the verge of being closed out of the competition in the 19th over, being left to get a near-statistical impossibility in the last over, and there are two balls left. The tactics are simple, bowl short and pack the square boundaries. It has worked.

So far.

Fifth ball. Rauf goes slow, and Kohli catches the variation and straight-bats a short ball, an almost impossible shot, over one of the largest grounds in the world straight back to long-on.

Sixth ball. In steams Rauf, furious, and this ball is fast, and Kohli is waiting for that too, like a panther about to pounce. Pirouetting deftly to the side, using his wrists like a gladiator administering the killing blow with his broadsword, he uses the express pace of Rauf to send the ball into the stands at fine-leg, for another six, sending billions in the world into near religious rapture.

This isn’t just an unbelievable shot, straight out of the dreams of childhood, but the coming back from the abyss, no make it roaring back, of a great sportsman waging a public battle in the last two years against doubt and declining form, putting to rest in two shots heard around the world, the shadows of his personal demons.

The universe, for a moment, is perfect.

And that perfection puts our hearts in a vice-like grip, as we well up, unable to understand this sudden burst of emotion, but then realize is not to be understood, but ridden, like the crest of a wave, and so we do exactly that, letting the moment wash over us, and then sear itself into our memories forever.

So in the future, when we remember it and we will, we will find ourselves magically in that story.

We were there that day when Kohli beat Pakistan.

We were there that day when he came back

Comfort Food and the Media

Comfort food is food that makes us feel good while killing the very fabric of what we are. They make us feel good by generating “happy hormones” and that generation is enabled not just by the chemical composition of comfort food, but by its associations, with childhood and family and friends, triggering memories of happier times, of people, and of flavors, fooling your brain into jumping from “This tastes like yesterday” to “This is yesterday”. It’s a beautiful trick, happiness through familiarity. It’s also why familiar tropes consistently work in movies and in books, and we loop-enjoy old movies and old songs because even though we may say we crave originality because it sounds an intellectually attractive idea, it is precisely the opposite that makes us happy. 

Now, with the “Hindu fascism of Modi and the dictatorship of BJP”, (Hassan Minhaj in his latest comedy special puts Modi on the list of dictators of the world he has gone up against equating him to the Saudi king, encapsulating the fundamental hypocrisy of the progressive argument: Trump is an election-denying cry-baby but we are not), Indian “liberals” (note the pervasive air-quotes in the sentence) are in desperate need of comfort. Wherever there is demand, the free market will create a supply. The business model here is simple. Confirm your audience’s biases, in the way comfort food or “Elaan-e-Jung” does. This makes them happy, they renew their subscription, rinse and repeat. And since opinions are a dime-a-dozen and usually available for free on social media, elevate yourself to journalism by providing the truth. As to whether the truth is truly true, let’s just say that they become so. If enough people like what they hear and tend to associate it with a happy place in their lives, the force of their happiness makes it true.

This is the point of the article where those “liberals” still reading it take umbrage to the “Indian liberals are in desperate need of comfort” part. Why call us out when there is Republic TV or Times Now, or as they are called “the propaganda arm of the fascist Hindu state” or more succinctly “Godi media”?

So yes, what about them? 

They work on the same principle too—pandering to the biases of their audience. They hammer at fault lines to confirm the most retrograde of biases against people we feel inimical towards, be it “people who don’t believe in the same God we do” or “celebrities whose lives we wish we had”, all in pursuit of TRPs and higher advertiser rates for key-market-segments.

But at least, and this is important, we know who they serve. Namely their advertisers. They are entertainers and the state of the world is their canvas, and they paint truth creatively, with advertisers and owners choosing their brush, their reality as synthetic as a reality show, and to anyone with half-a-brain this is obvious. They are believed in, not because they are seen to be good or trust-worthy but because they validate the worst biases in us, that’s why people watch, and that is to the benefit of their advertisers. It’s a pretty simple business model actually.

The bigger problem is the others, the good guys or so they claim, the supposed-independent media. They are a problem, because part of their appeal, nay perhaps the central thesis of their appeal, is the moral high ground they claim for themselves. They aren’t here for profit nor for viewership or for their own fame or to leverage their popularity later for something else. No, they are here because they represent the highest ideals of truth, journalism and protecting democracy, they don’t work for advertisers they work for you. So they are like Sekhar Suman in Tridev, bravely exposing the fascist machinations of the saffron Bhujang even if it may lead to his demise, by running an independent newspaper. They have sources within the sinister organizations like Khabarilal of Tiraanga, supplying them with the truth “they” don’t want you to find out, like how fascist Hindus are allying with Big Tech and where Pralaynath Gundaswamy (and not Gendaswamy as many people think), the villain of Tirangaa, stores his waiter white gloves, his kabab skewer and his fuse conductor. This moral high-ground is why what they say is not only the truth (Pultizer-worthy journalism), but what gives them the moral authority to even validate the truth (fact checkers who are apparently “nominated for the Nobel Prize”) of others.

And that is why the whole thing isn’t a “they are all the same”—the Republic TV and the Wire.

No. 

Just like if a certain kind of French fries advertised themselves as helping you lose weight and improving your heart health, thus basing their commercial appeal on a moral authority denied to “French fries’ from Big Food, then, yes, it is worth focusing our attention solely on them.

I am not going into a detailed deconstruction of The Wire vs Meta, because there are other overviews of the whole controversy, including this one from The Verge where my objections to the cybersecurity portion of the Wire’s reporting is cited.  Given the newsworthiness of the whole episode, I am going to presume that you have a good enough idea of what happened, or at least the facts and the timeline.  It is increasingly clear, based on the evidence, that what the Wire did can easily be explained with a word that rhymes with Daud, but the interesting thing isn’t that. 

No, the thing is how despite the shoddiness of their journalism, the Wire was able to convince so many otherwise educated people that they were providing them with the truth. Wait, not just convincing them, but making them attack those skeptical of the Wire’s claim, in essence, displaying the exact kind of brain-dead groupthink “progressive intellectuals” lampoon in their political opponents—the “fascist Hindu ditto-head”. 

So, when people pointed out the Indian-English allegedly used by a native English speaker in Meta, or some of the information technology things that were “off” (I was one who did both), they were attacked as speaking for “big tech” or being politically right-wing, or not knowing the subjects that they specialize in. And to think these people laugh at QAnon and conspiracy theories. 

There was a begrudging stand-down once the experts who the Wire claimed had validated the technological underpinning of their reporting denied being involved, and the supposed internal screenshots were shown to be done on an external facing interface, done after the story was broken.

And even then, once the straw had come out of the evidence presented, the consensus among “liberals” (yes the air quote once again) was that this was all a gigantic mistake, that the proprietors of the Wire were good people with the noblest of intentions, that they had been duped or maybe trusted too much, that this was not an attempt to pander to their audience by building on the widely-believed narrative that Modi and BJP are illegitimate rulers of India, foisted upon by a cabal of big business and big tech, and that the real problem, believe it or not, was that the Wire was subject to the scrutiny of the kind no one else is (“why cant we lie in peace?”) and finally the coup d’grace: “Meta is evil, so they definitely could have done it, so who cares really about the evidence?”

Makes sense, if one can be a fascist to a fascist, one can lie about a liar.

Ultimately though, we accept things as truth, because we trust the person saying the words. Trust is established primarily by the fact that I agree with the person’s opinions and that we share the same values. But trust is also established through authority, the chain of trust from a root-of-trust (how digital certificates work), and there is no greater example than the Time article about the founders of Alt News being nominated for a Nobel prize. Given that the nominations are secret, and not announced for 50 years after the award, and that the Time article quoted no sources, this should have been greeted with skepticism at least by people who scoff at the blind belief of other people in certain religions. But of course not. Not to speak of the supreme irony, that people who were going to win a Nobel prize for fact-checking should have fact-checked the rumor about themselves. 

But there it now became, part of the mythos, to be forever known as “Nobel peace prize nominated”. Whatever facts they check, their version of the facts is now presumed to be true since they are “authority”. They are the authority because they got nominated for the Nobel peace prize, and I know that because a Time article said so. Now for me to use the exact same chain of claims to prove I am a celebrity, because the legendary Harper’s Bazaar put me on a list of celebrities, and I hope the booking agents of Times Now and Republic are listening, so that instead of Rahul Roy they call me, next time they want a celebrity perspective.

The Wire story is merely an extension of that. Where The Wire failed its believers was that it failed to provide even the bare minimum of believability and that happened, not when people expressed skepticism of the language or the cybersecurity behind it all, but only when the independent experts who they claimed had validated their findings, the authority they tried to chain-of-trust into their claim denied being involved, in the process cutting off that chain.

Otherwise, this would now have become the “truth” to be built, couched in impenetrable technical language and even a demo-video, to be then expanded on and built on top with multiple Washington Post op-eds, to pass through the filters of other “fact-checkers” (no fact-checker checks the facts of the other fact-checker), cited and linked as proof positive of the fascist nature of the current Indian state, get the attention of international media, some journalism awards, and a further increase in authority, in turn enabling the next round of story-telling and narrative-pushing.

Oh what a lovely game. Oh how filling the food.

Open Letter to Aamir Khan

Dear Aamir Khan sir,

The device of writing an open letter is a cliche, but since we are on the topic of Lal Singh Chadda let me excuse myself by saying that “open letter” is not the most unoriginal thing in this sentence.

The reason I am writing this letter is to tell you I won’t be watching Lal Singh Chadda. That decision has nothing to do with your political stance or because Bollywood is supposedly evil.

It is because Lal Singh Chadda is tepid and boring, from its concept to its conceit and the fact that even a 150-second trailer, which can be made to look much more exciting than the movie, could not hide how terrible it is. That, sir, says something about the quality of your product. I apologize, but I cannot sit through another three hours of you regurgitating your PK expressions to show “simplicity”, and maybe I will end up missing a masterpiece, but hey, I didn’t watch Neil Nitin Mukesh’s last movie, nothing to do with my opinion on alliterative names, and I risked losing out on another Citizen Kane there too.

I know you like to do copies of Western movies, from Godfather to It Happened One Night to Memento to the Prestige, which is strange for someone who wants to win an Oscar and considers the Hindi film industry as derivative, but I honestly don’t know why you chose to do a scene by scene adaptation of Forrest Gump, of all things. But then I don’t claim to know why a late career Dev Anand did a movie where he pointed to the Twin Towers and said “dekho dekho World Trade Center gir raha hai” and then wrote a cheque for a million dollars to Giuliani or why in “Mr Prime Minister” he hunted down Al Qaeda by running after them in a green field. I put it down to the sorry fact that Dev Anand, a legend like you who at his best had pushed the boundaries of Hindi commercial cinema, just decided, once he reached a certain age, to do whatever he wanted. No one had the courage to tell him that Cindy Crawford may not like playing the mother of Dev Anand, that too uncredited, as she did in Awwal Number. Once you are big in Bollywood, you are like the ancient pharaohs of old, you can do whatever you want and there is not anyone like in the fable of Emperor’s New Clothes, that can tell you the very obvious truth.

And the truth is that Forrest Gump, a movie on American history told through the life of one man, which depending on who you ask is a critical look at American interventionism or a whitewashing of America’s original sin, racism, has zero relevance in an Indian context. Nothing crystallizes this ridiculousness more than that scene where you copy the famous “life is a box of chocolates” but you replace chocolates by golgappe, that too in a train where I have never seen golgappe being served, totally missing the subtext of the original.

A box of assorted chocolates, dear sir, is a part of Americana, just like laddoos in India, and unlike golgappe, each chocolate in a box is supposed to be different (or there are two of each kind) and what the original line means is that when you bite into the chocolate, you don’t know what you will get, gooey caramel or a hard nut, but it’s still chocolate and comforting and that’s what life is, varied moments with different aftertastes, but overall beautiful. How the hell that translates to Golgappe I don’t know, in the same way I don’t know why Dev Anand, during his rap in Mr Prime Minister, said “Peanuts…. peee…nuts”.

Now it’s a bit presumptuous of me to write an open letter saying I won’t watch your film. I know you don’t care. But the reason needs some explanation and clarification because I posit this is the real reason why the theaters are empty—the movie sucks and that comes out in the trailer and the premise and in your acting, and in an age of covid and rising prices, there are better things for people to do than watching aging stars act beyond their age.

However, my humble opinion is that your public pronouncements have little to do with it. Of course, there will be people on Twitter, Hindu right wing handles who will say they did it, that this is a backlash against godless Bollywood, or Urduwood as they like to call it, except that they did not. They could not have because your audience, as well as of the other Khans, don’t care for social media outrage and political posturing. That’s the thing about being one of the 3 Khans: at your best you are review proof and outrage proofs. But you are no longer at your best either. This is not the early 2000s.

Since I am writing the letter, forgive me for making it about myself. I belong to the old school where we didn’t believe in canceling people, where we accepted disagreement and criticism without losing any love. I was one of the first people who criticized PKs uneven take on Hinduism, before it became fashionable to call you a Hinduphobe. But I will not call you that, because you are not, and if you have made PK, you have also been the villainous “ice candy man” in Earth who wasn’t a Hindu (which in my opinion is your greatest role ever), and the Hindu right wing don’t seem to remember that or care to.

When I see you on public fora saying you love your country and you apologize to the public for causing hurt, I want to tell you that no one in their right mind, or rather only people in the “extreme right” mind, would accuse you of not loving your country. It makes me feel bad to see you having to be apologetic, or having to justify your loyalty to this country because I grew up on your movies starting from QSQT, and I have seen everything you have ever made, Thugs of Hindostan and Mela and Tum Mere Ho and Daulat Ki Jung and Love, Love, Love and even Raakh, and you are a part of the pop culture zeitgeist for many generations, and as Indian as anyone.

But here is the real tragedy.

I can’t trust any of your public pronouncements.

 I can’t say that this “I am sorry” is not a cynical cover for later spinning the inevitable failure of the movie, which is because of its theme, as a sign of growing Hindu majoritarianism and intolerance. I can’t say that this “I love India” is a way of manipulating audiences who hate the current government to come out and “give it to the bhakts” by watching the movie.

Why don’t I trust you, even though I am a long-time admirer of your work?

Because I have seen your synthetic tears on Satyameva Jayate. I have seen your activist avatar that is triggered by a new season of the show only. If you had spoken out on your worrying about the plight of minorities in this country, I would have understood that, but you said your family felt unsafe, that too you used the voice of your wife to make that statement, though everyone knows that your position and wealth and overall influence makes you above any kind of threat. That was pure posturing for publicity, and that too through an indirection.

When you used your bully pulpit on Satyameva Jayate to vilify doctors, did I think you meant it?

No.

You did it because it was good for the show. People don’t like doctors so let’s do the populist thing.

When you met the wife of the head of state of a country that’s virulently anti India for a photo-op, did I think you were anti India?

No.

 Because I knew that too was for commerce, you were shooting in Turkey.

So you see, my lack of trust works both ways.

Which is why I feel bad seeing you apologize but right then another part tells me this could well be another publicity stunt, another gimmick, another game.

With you, I know nothing is real, and I am fine with that. I don’t have to trust you to admire your work. And before you ask, I also do not trust the public pronouncements of other heroes, atheist one day, religious nationalist another, depending on the movie they are currently promoting and the direction the political movie is blowing, but for now, we are just talking about you.

So please, please don’t do “licensed remakes” like Forrest Gump and that too like this, because then even that “admirer of work” part too will be gone.

Sincerely,

Still a fan.

Partha Babu and Bad Corruption

The School Services Commission scam, wherein crores of rupees have been uncovered by the Enforcement Directorate from the homes of “close confidantes” of Partha Chatterjee, a powerful TMC chieftain, has led to a lot of “chi chi, e baba, bhaba jaaye ” conversation in Bengal, carried on over WhatsApp groups, and in the privacy of living rooms where there is no fear of being screenshotted.

Part of the interest in this case to a population jaded by political shenanigans stems from the sheer scale of money involved in a state used to seeing politicians taking bribes of a few lacs on secret camera by a sting operation. And now instead of a few measly notes, we have bundles of currency stacked like it was a scene straight out of Narcos or Breaking Bad. Part of the interest though is because of the money having being recovered from a person being referred to in the media as a “confidante”, an ex model and actress. Meme-worthy and deserving of parody and of one-liners as it is, after all what can common people do in the face of this level of corruption but laugh, the whole incident obscures some larger, more concerning questions.

The official Trinamool line is it’s a conspiracy of “you know who” and/or Partha Chatterjee is a bad apple and/or what about Nirav Modi? Leaving aside the whataboutery and the “it’s all planted” canned response to everything, the thing to consider is whether it indeed was just one person.

Highly unlikely.

First of all, the money was being stored in these apartments, they were essentially vaults. Which begs the question: for who and for what? The amount of money in currency notes is too huge for it to have been carried in Partha babu’s Punjabi pocket (Bengalis call kurtas Punjabis), the movement of money at this scale is an industrial exercise. Remember that the source of the money is allegedly bribes paid by candidates to be recruited into government positions, mostly teachers, and obviously the money wasn’t given directly to the confidantes of Partha Chatterjee. So how did the money reach here, over how many days, and through who? Because make no mistake, what we are seeing is a node on a distributed network, it’s like breaking into a router and missing the fact that it is only a small part of the Internet. And how has this network operated without the state law enforcement agencies doing anything? Why did it take central authorities to raid the premises, given the obvious scale of operations?

Now here’s the thing. Let’s be realists. Corruption is inevitable in a democracy, I mean if people are willing to kill, bribe, conspire, trigger riots to get elected, surely they must be getting something out of it other than the purple pleasure of serving the country.

But there are two kinds of corruption. One is the cut money from development. Whether it be allocation of bandwidth, literally pulling money from the air, or a certain percentage from real estate projects that winds up in the pockets of politicians, there the interests of the politicians are aligned with general development. This is why politicians are always for malls and bigger buildings and more infrastructure , because they skim off the top. If better roads and newer bridges mean richer politicians, maybe it’s not that bad, at least they are incentivized to do good or at least not get in the way of the good. Yes the cost of corruption is passed along to society and consumers, but it is still better than the other kind.

That kind being the School Services Commission scam. Why so? In the absence of industrial development and private sector jobs, people are willing to sell their ancestral property and take loans to bribe their way to the only steady income option available: government jobs. So how much they pay is a function of their desperation. Here, unlike the infrastructure scenario, the more the government misgoverns, and the greater the desperation, higher the bribes, more the bundles of cash landing up in the apartments of confidantes. This leads to a death spiral, where the worse things get, more money the politician makes. It also stands to reason that once the people actually get the jobs that were procured on the wings of illicit payments, they will themselves take money under the table to recover their investment, leading to tidal waves of corruption lasting for decades.

The jokes and memes will pass, but this will not.

The Kolkata of Now

Kolkata to me is a stranger. Bridges awash in Argentina colors, pictures of the greatest cultural icon after Rabindranath festooning the streets with self-effacing humility that would make Kim Jong Un go “hamba hamba dumba dumba”, cleaner and prettier than before but also more garish, the Kolkata of today is cognitively dissonant from the Kolkata of my imagination, burnt into my memories, banners of Sukhen Das in jean-jacket and Tapas Pal and Chiranjeet as cowboys, the Brando and Dean and Clint of Bengal, and the ubiquitous hammers and sickle of the Communists, sickle-cell anemia brought to life, dirty grey walls with “Taka mati mati taka promaan korlen Prasanta kaka” graffiti, speckled with spit and cow dung and Rorschach tests of dried urine, with the only relief being a poster of a dirty film: Bedroom Eyes at Navina or Sirocco at Bhavani, or buxom silhouettes of the women of Ora Kara playing at Sarkarina, all set to the background music of the rush of rubbish in the open drains and the dance of mosquitoes.

The Kolkata in my mind isn’t very nice nor does it smell well and it is as oppressive as it is today, if not worse. Nostalgia makes everything better, but it still can’t save the Kolkata of old. But whatever it be, the city was familiar, the gray skies, the forever rains, the waterlogged streets and even amidst the multitude, people I knew, from school or tuition or college, and wherever you be, the familiarity of food.

Oil, starch, sweat, sugar, and plastic jugs, things that made you once happy, are still there. But as the song goes “Tumi aar nei se tumi” or “you are not you”. And so the comforts of old appear as figments of a nightmare—-a phantasmagoria of cholesterol, diabetes, jaundice, and suffering, clogging you up inside, squeezing out the only thing that is truly yours.

Time.

The Kolkata of now is strange, it’s neither London nor is it still Kolkata.

I am not in it. But it is still in me.

India as a Union of States

Whenever you write about Rahul Gandhi or mention him, the reaction you get from Rahul Gandhi supporters (they preface their support with “I am not a supporter of Rahul Gandhi” because if there is anything that hurts more than being a Kolkata Knight Riders fan is fessing up to love for this royal scion) is “if Rahul Gandhi is of no significance, why do you bother about him?”

Well, it is not universally true that Rahul Gandhi is not significant. Politically, in Indian elections, yes. For now, and I say for now, because Indian politics is so fickle and the forces that have propped up the family are not without resources and have the brains to play the long game. But for the West, particularly to large swathes of Europeans and North Americans whose interest in India is merely perfunctory, he represents “royal blood”, which ties into their idea of India being still a land of elephants and kings and the Gunga-din, and so while we in India might take his pronouncements with the seriousness reserved for the dialogs of Batuknath Lalan Prasad Malpaani’ (played by Shakti Kapoor in Chaalbaaz), given that both of them are perennially “chota sa, pyara sa, nanha sa, baccha”, regrettably that is not the case internationally. Add to it the fluent English, lack of Indian accent, and the Caucasian-friendly looks, Rahul Gandhi represents a comforting face to a Western audience and so what he says, unfortunately, matters.

Rahul Gandhi’s handlers have realized this, which is why Rahul Gandhi is often seen in the “phoren”, talking to people who do not have a vote in India, while his own party leaders rue the fact that the man is not available to meet his party’s grassroot leaders back in India.

Sample some of his priceless lines here:

“A democratic context depends on certain structures, it depends on an election system that is free, a judiciary that is independent, and a press that is fair and, very importantly, depends on the type of money that different political formations have. If we are fighting an electoral contest, then we are fighting the institutional structure of India.” (

Link

Now if Trump and his acolytes cast aspersions on the American electoral system, without an iota of proof, it is called fascism. When Rahul Gandhi does exactly the same, without an iota of proof, it is called dissent.

Ah well.

But the topic of this piece is not the royal scion throwing mud at the Indian electoral system just because he is a sore loser. That is old hat.

I am writing this because this gentleman is saying something way more dangerous. And not just once.

Sample the headline of the piece.

The word “nation” is a Western concept, says the forever-emergent prince of Indian democracy, India is a union of states LIKE EUROPE. (Capitalization mine)

So the corollary is evident. If Brittan could exit the European Union through a referendum, so can Kashmir and Punjab and whoever-so-wishes exit from the Union of India. If my family can’t rule it , well no one else shall either.

Fans of Rahul Gandhi (who will hasten to add that they are not) will say he is merely repeating what is written in the Indian constitution. Yes, well-caught and here is an ice-cream. Now listen. When India was formed in 1947, it indeed was a union of states, princely (565 of them) and British-held, and the likes of Sardar Patel used instruments of accession to create that union. The essence of the establishment of India as a sovereign, socialist democratic republic was to fuse those “states” into one indivisible whole. After independent India was established as a “nation”, the states were then further divided and sub-divided, through action at the federal level, proving again and again, as if it needed proving, that India was “nation”. Brussels, on the other hand, cannot decide to split a constituent “union” member. Of course, if Rahul Gandhi only knew that the “N” in his party stands for “national” and not for “Nehru”, his great grandfather, maybe he would not have been able to say what he said with a straight face.

I can be wrong. Rahul Gandhi does set his own standards.

Which brings me to Jawaharlal Nehru. It has become fashionable by those who get their history on Twitter and Whatsapp to dump on Nehru, but let’s accept that, despite his faults, of which there were many, Nehru set into place many of India’s robust democratic institutions that have made it what it is, with a sagacity that was beyond many of those who currently appropriate his brand. One of his greatest intellectual achievements, and yes he was a true intellectual of the highest order, regardless of whether you agreed with all he said or not, was to precisely formulate the notion of India as a “nation”, one that his great grandkid is so desperately trying to roll back.

Those people Rahul Gandhi is speaking to in Cambridge, their ancestors, long-coated Occidental experts and genteel British liberals, had actually promulgated the theory that India was never a nation, but merely an union of princely states. Yes, and there is more iron-y here than in Shimoga, is exactly what Rahul Gandhi is parroting back to them today. Let no one accuse the man of being original, as they say.

So the old British liberal line was that India did not exist as a concept. The notion of nation, and the British obviously used Western ideals drawn from Western political philosophy, of Plato and Thomas Hobbes and the rest, was foreign to India. What existed as India was a British construct, just like the concept of a nation and hence any independence, should it be given, should be given back to the states. It was then that Nehru, who along with others, dismantled that philosophical argument by pointing to history, before the British came, of an idea of India, captured in the annals of foreign travelers as an individual unit. No matter who ruled, the philosophical unity that is felt by the people has remained and it is that identifies itself as a nation, indivisible and fundamental.

This philosophical underpinning of Indian nationhood is nothing remotely close to the Union of European Union, and I would have possibly wondered if Rahul Gandhi has ever read the works of his own great grandfather but having seen the man in action over the years, I know the answer. Just because the word “union” is there in the Indian constitution, and the word “union” is there in the European Union, does not mean they are in any way similar, just like there is a reserved word called “union” in the C language, which has nothing to do with either.

This is not just a cheap shot at someone with a series of gaffes as long as IPL trophies in CSK’s trophy cabinet, a marginal player in Indian politics, whose main significance is that he makes BJP wins elections.

No, this is to say something much deeper about the very nature of what India is.

Now that Mahabharat Murders is coming to streaming on Hoichoi

Now that Mahabharata Murders is being adapted cinematically on Hoichoi, what is the best outcome for me?

Increased book sales? Marginal impact.

On the road to promotion to Bengali intellectual? I don’t swing that way.

Adulation among bongo-lolonas? Next…

What I can hope, at the maximum, is respect in the NRI Bengali community. There are many levels of respect, and like sponsorship of US Bongo sommelon, they are at bronze, silver, gold, platinum and then of course Ma Mati Manush level

Bronze level is recognition at local NRI Durga Pujo, in the greater LA area, as in “oh I saw that programme based on your book on Hoichoi, you are that omukh lekhok, accha do you know Srijit Mukherjee?”

Silver is same but with free admission to ashtamir bhojon and people taking selfies and posting it on their social media, with the tag “promukh lekhok”

Gold is when you are invited to NRI Durga Pujos outside the local calling area, as a special guest, under the tag “sombhranto lekhok” which includes speech, and as I had once read in a program announcement in Maryland for a famous person “for 25 dollars more, you can get intimate time with”. Yes I will offer intimacy for a price, not less than 30 dollars (inflation is crazy now) Gold means you stay at the house of the Durga pujo President, and you have a photo opportunity there too, though you may have to sit through his teenage daughters disinterestedly signing Rabindrasangeet.

Platinum means front row seats at annual Bongosomnelon, special platinum pass, hotel, drinking with the Bongosommelon President and doing adda with Parambrata, selfies with all and sundry and adulation from boudis and mashimas, on the way to becoming “kingbodonti lekhok”, an achievement that is unlocked only when people you know start getting the bronze level treatment, simply because they know me.

Ma Maati Manush level means the impossible: Bengali intellectual tag forever, Bongosomman and Rajya Sabha MPship, with Dover Lane being renamed as Arnab Dharani, and a statue being constructed of me near the local para club that will have hanging around its neck, a decayed flower garland, and splatters of love from crows flying overhead.

Or as they say, a day on twitter.

How To Make Peace With Your Parents Becoming Old And Infirm

The title of this post was not my idea, nor was this topic. This above was what someone I had known for many years through my blog had requested I do a podcast on. While I do love people asking me my opinions on the Kashmir files or Ajinkya Rahane as an opener for KKR, what really moves me is when people want to know my thoughts things that are personally important to them. I thought of doing this as a podcast on video, but I was worried I might not be able to get through it without getting moist-eyed.

So let me write it down, if for no other reason, that you cannot see my face.

How do I make peace with my parents becoming old and infirm? For a start, I do not think of my parents as old and infirm. I just cannot. In my mind’s eye they are frozen in time, as they once were, firm and healthy and commanding and “always there”. When I dream, and I often dream of my childhood, they are as I remember them as a child, because the thing with children, and that’s a good and a bad thing both, is that they do not see their parents as human beings but as parents.

And people age, parents don’t.

Which is why every time I see them in real life, after a while, I am shocked for a fraction of a second, as the algorithms in my brain jitter, trying to reconcile my mental model of them with reality. And as I become older, and they too, the inevitability of our time with each other decreasing hits me, from time to time, often just as I am awake, in that twilight zone between wakefulness and sleep, when the people in the dream, young and healthy, fade away into the knowledge of their present, and the inevitability seeps through, of that journey home I will have to make one day on the news, and yes, I too struggle, struggle like my friend, to make peace with my parents becoming old and infirm and then that which I know will follow.

The thing that I tell myself, when I have these thoughts is that there are only two ways this can play out—either my parents deal with my mortality or I deal with theirs. Of course, as a parent myself, I know that the former would break my parents, which leaves only one option left, and that is how it should be, in the best of scenarios.

After telling myself that, I try to not fight as much with my parents as I used to, not that I am always particularly successful (after all it’s difficult to get rid of old habits), because I want the time we have left to be the best as it can be.

When we are younger, time is always infinite, and there is always a next time. Now as each day passes by, you know there might not be, and so you have to compensate for it.

The last thing I do to cope is to tell my parents that I love them. I know it may sound trite, but if counting the likes from strangers makes you feel good, why don’t you think that your words will have at least that effect on your own parents? For words are important, and they don’t have to particularly profound or poetic, and your parents saw you shitting in your diapers, so with them, you don’t have to be sophisticated, original or clever.

Which leads me to finish with something my daughter says to me. A few years ago, I used to pick her and hold her up and then she would flap around like a bird. I can still pick her up, but I cannot hold her up like that for that long, above my head, floating in the air, and I tell her “Bubu is getting old”, to which tells me “But when Bubu gets older, he will get stronger and more powerful.”

Now, most likely it’s just a thing she says because it’s fun to say. She is, after all, nine years old.

But I think, and this may certainly me over-interpreting, that she is trying to tell me something else, something deeper, that the power that makes me hold her up is love, which will increase with moments and memories of togetherness; that a parent’s true strength is not in their arms and back and knees, but in their hearts, a magical place that is beyond the reach of age, infirmity and death.

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